Professor Motomura Comments on President Obama's Executive Power to Change Immigration Policies in Multiple Media Outlets

September 5, 2014 – Professor Hiroshi Motomura has commented on President Obama’s use of executive power to change immigration policies in multiple media outlets.

Professor Motomura was quoted in an Al Jazeera America article:

“You have a system that runs on discretion,” he said. “People make it seem like that discretion is not supposed to be exercised at all and, all of a sudden, the president wants to exercise it. The question is not whether it is exercised but who does it and how.”

Among these [institutional design choices the president must make] are how to respect “rule of law” values in the context of prosecutorial discretion,” Hiroshi Motomura, a law professor at UCLA, writes in an email, “and those values include consistency, predictability, and nondiscrimination (which can be viewed as forms of consistency and predictability in this context).

What
Obama has done so far on immigration and what he’s likely to do in the
future can be justified on the theory of prosecutorial discretion, the
long-standing executive branch power to decide in which cases the law
should be enforced, Motomura said.

“We have a system that runs on
discretion. There are 11 million people in the country who in theory
are not supposed to be here. Congress has funded the capability to
deport maybe half a million people a year,” the professor said.

Hiroshi Motomura, an immigration law professor at UCLA and author of the new book "Immigration Outside the Law," said there are legal limits on the President's authority over immigration law. For instance, he can't change the rules for noncitizens to become permanent residents or put them on a path to citizenship because Congress sets those rules. But he said none of these limits stands in the way of expanding DACA as long as it's done correctly.